Domestic Division of Labour - Housework

Question 1

Willmott and Young:

Answer 1

Argue that the family has become more symmetrical: women can participate both in the expressive and instrumental role.

Structured interviews of 1000 WC families, found 72% of men helped around the house once a week. Once in 50s once in the 70s. Far more couples have joint conjugal roles.

‘New Man’ = a nurturing man in touch with his feminine side.

Evaluation = Oakley says that ‘helping once a week’ could simply mean tucking the children into bed occasionally, too vague to reflect joint conjugal roles.

Question 2

Oakley:

Answer 2

Disagreed with W+Y, did unstructured interviews with 40 women in between 20-30 years old. Found that 15% of men had high participation in housework and 25% in childcare.

Women suffer the dual burden of housework AND being expected to do paid work.

Duncombe and Marsden = Triple Shift: domestic labour, manual labour and emotional labour.

Evaluation = Can disagree with W+Y, subjective as a ‘high level’ of work is vague. Also, only represented a small number of families so such a small sample is unrepresentative.

Question 3

The Commercialisation of Housework:

Answer 3

How new technology and services have made housework easy: washing machines and dishwashers make it easier for domestic labourers, saving them a huge amount of time and effort.

Silver = men are more likely to do housework because of this, as it is easier.

Gershuny = Lagged adaption, men slowly adjusting to cultural changes but are not quite there yet.

However, there is a growing rise of weaponised incompetence where men are deliberately bad at jobs so the women will not ask them to do it again.

Also, only the rich middle class have the money to afford products so there is still an unequal division in working-class households.